A Tour of Maya

This sample chapter introduces you to Maya's structure and design. You'll learn all the interface elements and start to get a feel for getting around in the panels. You'll also look at playing back animation and the Shaded and Wireframe modes of viewing objects.

This chapter is from the book

This chapter is from the book

In This Chapter

It's time to start Maya and learn how to use it. Before we start to discuss
how to make anything, though, this chapter introduces you to Maya's structure
and design. You'll learn all the interface elements and start to get a
feel for getting around in the panels. You'll also look at playing back
animation and the Shaded and Wireframe modes of viewing objects. These are the
primary parts of any 3D program, and after you gain some comfort with these
true fundamentals of Maya, you'll be poised to move on to specifics:

The Maya interface Take a tour of each feature as we describe it
and name the parts.

Detail and shading See how any 3D panel can be displayed in several
different modes.

Changing your interface Learn how to quickly change the Maya interface
to suit the task at hand by resizing and reassigning the panels and minimizing
or maximizing any single panel.

Key Terms

Attribute Editor The primary interface for changing objects and
such in Maya, available as a floating window or docked at the interface's
right side.

Channel Box Used to view and edit the variables of your currently
selected item, usually accessed at the interface's right side.

Hotbox A workflow speedup that many Maya animators lovean
overlaid menu triggered by holding down the spacebar.

tumble The official term for spinning or rotating around in a view.

track The official term for panning or moving linearly across a
view.

dolly The official term for zooming into and out of a view (technically,
the term for moving the camera into or out of a scene).

zoom Used for actions in which you draw a window to magnify
or reduce.

LMB The left mouse button, the primary action-taking button.

MMB The middle mouse button, often a secondary or alternative action-taking
button.

RMB The right mouse button; usually provides options to select with
the LMB (as with most Windows applications).

Wireframe mode Viewing a 3D scene as lines that make it look as
though the objects are made from a wire screen mesh. Until the fairly recent
advent of higher powered 3D graphics cards, the only interactive way to
work with 3D scenes.

Shaded mode Lets you view geometry in a crudely rendered interactive
way (not to be confused with the high-quality renderer). Any 3D view panel
in Maya can be in Wireframe or Shaded mode.

Gouraud shading A crude form of smooth shading that adds highlights
to polygonal objects by averaging the polygon corners. It renders quickly
and is the method used for interactive shaded mode in Maya panels.

HotKeys to Memorize

Alt+LMB orbit

Alt+MMB pan

Alt+LMB+MMB zoom

Ctrl+Alt+drag window with LMB zoom window

Ctrl+A activate the Attribute Editor

f use the Frame Selected Object option (zoom in or out to the boundaries
of the current object)

a use the Frame All Objects option (zoom in or out to the boundaries
of the scene)